by David Nobbs
‘I’m really sorry, Jane. If there’s anything I can do …’
‘There isn’t really. Thanks for ringing. I’ll let you know if anything happens.’
‘Thanks. Jane?’
‘Yes?’
‘I … hope you’ll be all right.’
‘Thanks.’
He put the phone down, and breathed a sigh of deep relief. He had been in danger of saying something unwisely personal.
He drove slowly, so slowly, to Acton and Mike’s flat – well, bedsit, but people didn’t seem to use that term any more.
He was pleased to see that Mike was looking slightly less slovenly than the last time he’d seen him. The way he was dressed, he looked ready for combat in Afghanistan – in fact, James thought, maybe better prepared than the troops, if rumour was anything to go by, but at least he’d assembled a full range of gear on which no food had been dropped.
He invited James in, but the smell of stale fat, stale beer and urine discouraged him.
James drove to a pub in Ealing that he said was the best in the area, and compared to the Disinfectant Arms it was Raffles in Singapore. Horse brasses abounded though no member of staff would have dared to go near a horse. Sky Sports was on in one corner, with a loop of uninteresting facts coming round every seventy-eight seconds.
James took care to order the first round.
‘Bloody Wimbledon,’ said Mike aggressively as they took their pints to a corner of the beer garden. James wouldn’t have dared drink a gin and tonic in Mike’s presence. It would have precipitated a diatribe about going posh. ‘Oh, well, only forty-two days to the new football season.’
James suffered from a great handicap in male society. He knew nothing about football and cared less. But Mike, he knew, had very little left in his life besides football, now Melanie had left him. He even had two fantasy teams with the Daily Telegraph. Better get the football chat over.
‘How are the Arsenal going to do this year?’
Mike was contemptuous.
‘Tottenham. I’m a Spurs man. Can’t you see the suffering in my face?’
‘Sorry.’
There followed a cluster of football jokes. Tottenham have so many Jewish supporters they’re renaming it Tottenham Hutzpah. My brother knows so little about football he thinks Glenn Hoddle is a malt whisky. James laughed, but it wasn’t possible to laugh sufficiently to salve Mike’s insecurities. Arsenal are so dirty one of their players named his autobiography Mein Bergkamp. James couldn’t even pretend to laugh at this one. He had never heard of Dennis Bergkamp. The mood was uneasy. In this pub, with this man, it was James who felt the misfit. That was so unfair.
‘Same again?’ asked Mike, who was drinking faster than James.
‘I’ll get them. This evening’s on me.’
‘No.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t want your charity. I have money. I get benefits.’
‘Compromise. We share the rounds and then I’ll take you for a curry, on me. I long for a good curry. It was one of the few things Deborah and I didn’t agree about. Well, she said they put weight on. She was big framed. She had to be careful. We’ll have one more, and then I’ll treat you to a curry. Please. I want to.’
‘OK. Agreed.’
Mike bought another round.
‘Cheers.’
‘Cheers.’
‘I’m sorry I’m sometimes so stroppy with you,’ said Mike. ‘You’re the only one who ever comes to see me.’
This made James feel uneasy. He was so aware that he never invited Mike into his life. It came to him in a flash now that this wasn’t just because he was ashamed of how Mike was, but also because he was ashamed of how he was – his cosy life, his tasteful middle-class house, the safeness, the smugness.
‘Except Roger Dodds.’
‘What?’
Returning from his thoughts, James had no idea what Mike was talking about.
‘He invited me to a party the other day. Private room above some pub in Chelsea. Right out of the blue. I didn’t even know he still had my address. It was his fiftieth. He’s a bit older than the rest of us. He didn’t come to Cambridge straight from school. Some kind of health problem. Mind you, I think he’d invited anyone he could lay his hands on.’
‘He didn’t invite me.’
‘Oops.’
A particularly noisy plane roared throatily towards Heathrow, drowning for a moment the endless murmur of traffic on the still evening air.
‘So, I was invited to something and you weren’t.’
It would be mean to resent Mike’s little triumph, but James couldn’t help being miffed. Why hadn’t Roger invited him?
Then he remembered something Jane had said.
‘Did you see Ed there at all?’
‘Ed Winterburn?’
‘Yes.’
‘No.’ Mike had a rather strange expression. ‘Why?’
‘He’s disappeared.’
‘Ed?’
‘Yes.’
‘Disappeared?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good God. Good God. Ed!’
‘I know. Not exactly the disappearing type.’
‘More the reappearing type when you don’t want him. Still … disappeared! What’s Roger Dodds got to do with it?’
‘Jane said that he went up to Chelsea for Roger Dodds’s party, and hasn’t been seen since.’
‘Hell’s bells.’
‘He wasn’t there?’
‘Absolutely not. Well, I didn’t see him anyway. I suppose he could have been there. It was very crowded. But I put myself about quite a bit, you know, quite a lot of people I hadn’t seen for years, I’d have thought I would have seen him if he’d been there.’
In no time their glasses were empty and instead of going to the restaurant James found himself buying a third pint. A helicopter added to the evening’s varied traffic noises. There was just the faintest breeze, but it was still hot in the beer garden. Conversation was proving so much easier than it usually was with Mike. James told of his activities during the last few days. Mike talked proudly of his success with his fantasy football team at the pub last season, and described quite amusingly the torments Tottenham Hotspur had put him through over the years. But all the time James had the feeling that something was not quite right.
Memories of Roger Dodds led inevitably to Cambridge. People who have been to Cambridge never quite get over it, however hard they try.
Mike bought his second round. James didn’t want a fourth pint, but it would be patronising to refuse. Sometimes social considerations were more important than one’s own desires. He wondered how many extra drinks the rounds system caused in a year. It must have been invented by a landlord.
They found a safe subject to chat about. People with whom they had both lost contact.
‘Do you remember the weekend when your parents were away and you and me and Willy Tompkins and Derek Hammond cycled over from Cambridge to your house for the weekend?’
Mike smiled at the memory.
‘Yeah, it was fun.’
‘We all swam in the Ouse, which seems ridiculous now, but it was hot like it is this week. I didn’t know the Fens.’
‘Lucky you. They’re horrid. Flat and the soil’s almost black, and silly straight rivers everywhere, and ugly, stunted little houses.’
‘Well, what I remember is beautiful wide sunsets and distant church spires and space. And we caught all those perch in some unprepossessing little river that nobody knew was there, but it wasn’t called a river, it was the something drain, picturesque Dickensian name.’
Again, James had the feeling that something was wrong. Mike seemed wary somehow.
‘I don’t remember that. I don’t know where you mean.’
‘You must. It was your secret place, you said.’
‘So secret I’ve forgotten it. James, it’s all gone. I’ve been drinking myself to death. My mind’s shot. My memory’s buggered.’
‘We went to
your pub, and chatted to the locals, and played dominoes and darts and shove halfpenny, and challenged the locals, and we walked, and we ate endless amounts of those perch that we’d caught, and it was wonderful. I mean, it all seems so terribly innocent now, but it was all we needed, all we wanted. We ended up drunk, but we didn’t go out to get drunk. Look at these people here. Don’t you sense a communal desperation? Look at that lot over there, knocking back their shots. The aim is to get pissed. We didn’t go out to get pissed. We got pissed because we were enjoying ourselves. With people we didn’t know. We chatted to locals, farmhands, anybody. All the people here are in self-contained groups. You couldn’t break in. They wouldn’t let you. And that’s not what pubs are about.’
An ambulance completed Ealing’s repertoire of traffic noises.
‘That ambulance makes your point,’ said Mike. ‘Tension stalks the streets of the city today.’
Mike talked about his family, how Melanie had turned against him, how she had turned their two children against him, how he had given up on seeing them, how it felt like having one of his legs chopped off. James told him about the new development over Charlotte, his hopes, his fears, his joy, his pain.
James had the feeling that there was something important about this evening, but that it was slipping away on a tide of alcohol. Well, never mind. The slipping away was very pleasant. It seemed no time at all before they had finished their four pints and were setting off for their curry.
The restaurant was within walking distance, and he decided to leave the car where it was, and not drink with the meal. The meal would take quite a while and by the time it had ended he would be just about under the limit. With a bit of luck.
But the moment he got into the restaurant he was hit by a wave of curry nostalgia, and decided that a large bottle of Cobra would go down beautifully.
In his youth there had still been flock wallpaper and bad photographs of the Taj Mahal in Indian restaurants, but now they gleamed white and the walls were adorned with abstract art. He loved the smell of curry and incense, the bustle, the poppadums, the pickles, the eccentric spelling on the menus, the ordering too much, the sharing of the food. Mike was happy for him to order for them both. He ordered onion bhajis and tandoori king prawns, followed by chicken pathia, methi gosht, tarka dhal, boiled rice and peshwari naan. They ate themselves silly and drank two more large bottles of Cobra. James discovered that Mike admired Charles and was another Schumann man, liked Sibelius and Mahler, disliked Mozart and Strauss. They managed to argue passionately about modern art without resorting to fisticuffs. Indeed, they came to a mutual conclusion, that the debate about whether modern art was rubbish or not was itself rubbish. The point wasn’t whether it was good or bad but that the criteria for judging it had become so specialist that it was impossible for inverted commas ordinary close inverted commas people to know, so that, in the end, the hated comment of ‘I know what I like’, considered the ultimate badge of the philistine, became the only possible reaction of anyone who wasn’t an expert. They both agreed that they hated intellectual snobbery, yet believed that some work was bound by its nature to be elitist. They deplored the lack of gentleness in modern television drama, as opposed to period television drama. Why was the only choice between bonnets and blood? Was there nothing to say about the modern world that wasn’t violent?
‘How many pathologists a week do we see on television?’ asked James rhetorically. ‘I mean, we never come across murder in our own lives, do we?’
He exchanged a look with Mike, and he had a feeling that Mike’s look was meaningful, though he was far too drunk by now to know its meaning.
Mike forgot that he had a chip on his shoulder and James forgot that Mike was hard work and that he met him out of a sense of duty rather than of pleasure. They were truly living for the moment. A glass of Grand Marnier seemed just the thing to finish the evening off, and, if one, why not two?
James was not so drunk as to believe that it was safe for him to drive home. He would go by taxi, and drop Mike off on his way.
However, when Mike said, ‘I’ve got a rather odd drink that I’ve never dared to open, it’s Belgian gin, and it’s in a bottle shaped like a hand grenade – would you like to come in and try it?’, James was drunk enough to say ‘yes’.
Sunday
There was no alarm to wake James at seven-thirty. He awoke suddenly, from a deep sleep in a dark cave shared with a monster. He was immediately in the grip of fear and tension. Something was very wrong.
Deborah was dead. Charlotte was living in a house in South London with a man named Chuck, and there was no Deborah to discuss it with. Ed had disappeared, and there was no Deborah to share the drama.
And today he was seeing Helen.
What time was it?
He tried to sit up. A steam hammer descended from the ceiling and crashed into his forehead. The room spun. His mouth tasted the way silage smelt.
How had he got home? Had he driven? Fear coursed through his heavy, aching frame.
He began to recall the events of the evening, how something odd had remained just out of reach, but how unexpectedly enjoyable it had been, how after being tired all day he had been full of energy, hadn’t wanted the day to end. He remembered going back to Mike’s place. A band of ice slipped down him from his neck to his feet as he recalled Mike producing a bottle shaped like a hand grenade. He shuddered. He began to shake. He felt very cold. His coldness frightened him. The fear made him sweat. The sweat froze on the icy tundras of his chest. He remembered them swearing eternal friendship. Mike had produced an autograph book, and asked him to sign it on the same page as someone called Alan Gilzean. Apparently he had played for Spurs and so this was a great honour. Oh, God, he’d signed it with his very expensive and much-loved gold Mont Blanc pen and Mike had said, ‘That’s right. Remind me of the times when I could afford nice things.’ But the moment must have passed. They had hugged with drunken affection on his departure. Oh and, thank God, he remembered the minicab.
He found that if he moved very very slowly the pain was just about bearable. Slowly, carefully, gradually, he twisted his body so that he could see his alarm clock. He couldn’t focus. When he did manage to focus, he wished that he hadn’t. The clock brought him bad news. It was already twenty-five to ten.
There was no way he was going to be well enough to be ready for lunch with Helen.
He had to be.
It must have been more than twenty years since he’d suffered a hangover like this. He’d only had one since he’d married Deborah. She had put her foot down. He’d discovered the steel that lay beneath the warmth. Everybody thought how wonderful she’d been, but … no, she had been wonderful. The steel had been sparingly used, wisely used, and always with affection.
He needed some steel now. He needed someone to pull him together. But this was all ridiculous. If Deborah was still here, he wouldn’t need the steel, because he wouldn’t be having lunch with Helen.
He shouldn’t even be thinking about Deborah. This was his great day, the beginning of the rest of his life, the first important step on the road to total happiness.
He was going to blow it.
Desperation gave him the courage to crawl out of bed. The floor was moving as if he was on a boat. He stood and waited for it to steady itself, then walked ever so cautiously to the tiny en-suite bathroom stolen from the Georgian proportions of the room. He bent down over the bowl of the two-flush eco-lavatory, retched, and knew that he wasn’t going to be able to be sick. He didn’t know if this was good news or bad news.
He walked downstairs, his head hurting at every step. He was still naked, and a streak of sunlight caught his body from the window on the landing. It was a cruelly lovely day sent by a mocking God.
He opened a cupboard door, got himself a glass, padded to the fridge-freezer, filled the glass. The first touch of the chilled water on his parched mouth gave him a huge shock of … he wasn’t sure if it was pain or pleasure. He gulped three glass
es down as fast as he dared. The fourth he sipped. It was still not possible that he would be fit to have lunch with Helen, but it was now distinctly possible that he would live. He didn’t know if this was good news or bad news.
He forced himself to have a cold shower. This was make-or-break. The first shock of the icy water almost stopped him breathing, but it worked. By the time he’d shaved and cleaned his teeth and dried his hair, he felt almost human, and brave enough to try his second, and final, make-or-break move.
A bacon sandwich.
Deborah always had bacon in. He hunted for it and found it. How long had it been there? Should it be tinged with green? Did bacon usually smell that strong? His stomach turned. He felt a retch coming on. But it stopped.
This could be a very wrong move, but he wasn’t going to abandon the bacon yet. He put it in the frying pan and fried it gently in its own fat. He got a loaf from the bread bin. Should it be tinged with green? No. He would give it to the birds.
He ate three rashers of bacon, slowly, savouring each mouthful. Surely, if it was off, he wouldn’t be enjoying it this much?
He stood up, put his plate in the sink, decided that he wasn’t yet well enough to face washing up a greasy plate, put the plate in the dishwasher, alongside plates that had been there for almost a week, made himself a cup of black coffee, and went upstairs to get dressed.
He wouldn’t have described himself as ‘in the pink’, but he felt so much better than he had any right to feel that he was being carried along on a wave of relief that was growing into exhilaration. Suddenly, however, just as he was beginning to feel safe, he had a very disturbing experience. He was looking at his array of shirts, and was about to choose a bright red one, when he sensed that Deborah was looking over his shoulder and frowning. He went cold all over again. He knew that she wasn’t, it was just a lingering effect of the hangover, but it was deeply disturbing. He chose a sober dark green shirt, and forced himself to turn round to see … nobody.
He came out in a sweat and had to take another shower. He was running out of time, and he would have to get a taxi to take him to his car which was hugely out of his way.
